Don’t bogart that joint, my friend. You may need to pass it around at the next management meeting.

Pot isn’t exactly legal in Massachusetts.

Not yet.

It’s been decriminalized – you can get fined but not jailed for possession – and we’re setting up for dispensaries for medical marijuana.

But there are not yet head shops or bong parlors on every corner. No vending machines where you can drop in a few quarters for a bit of bud. (E6 for 0.5 oz. sensi, C8 for a blunt.)

Just a matter of time, I’m guessing.

Whether Massachusetts or some other state is the next to follow Washington and Colorado as a pro-pot haven, high times is a-coming, and businesses are preparing for it.

In fact, ArcView, an angel investment firm from – where else?  San Francisco - recently hosted an event in – where else? Denver – where those in the cannabis biz came to pitch their ideas.

But bar the large pot plants on the stage, in many respects the meeting was no different from other gatherings of American investors and businessfolk. Ties, women and non-white faces were scarce. Pitches were peppered with jargon and cheerfully optimistic revenue projections, though not always a clear indication of the product or service on offer. But there was also a strong atmosphere of camaraderie, a sense that here there was an industry to be built rather than turf wars to be fought. (Source: The Economist.)

I’ve been to a number of investor days, but nothing all that interesting was ever pitched. Oh, I saw some voice activation stuff (when that was new and exciting) and some RFID tagging stuff (when that was new and exciting). But nothing quite like this.

While it’s pretty interesting, the thought of pot becoming big business is enough to weird anyone out, even someone who hasn’t indulged in decades.  But, hey, why not? Someone’s making money off of it illegally, avoiding taxes and no doubt inflicting some pretty inferior, unregulated goods on the market. (Not that the regulated market for anything keeps inferior goods out…)

The legal cannabis market was worth $1.2 billion in 2011, reckons ArcView. By now it will be much bigger. Some look forward to a fully legalized industry worth $100 billion or more.

One hundred large! Wow! (Wowie zowie?)

Not all this will be baggies and spliffs.

In fact:

…says Steve Berg, an adviser to ArcView, investors remain wary of any outfit that “touches the leaf” directly. Thus the heavy presence at ArcView of ancillary businesses in which risks as well as returns are lower: from cannabis-oil extractors to electronic plant-trimmers. Some have built their business models around regulatory schemes: the pitch of Canna Security America, which is seeking $2m to expand, is that it helped write Colorado’s security regulations. Who better to help a dispensary implement them?

Another “ancillary” product plumped at the conference was Buzzkill, which un-highs you if you need to sober up in a hurry. (What an excellent product name! Hudson Nutraceuticals, I salute you!)

Once it all goes corporate and when, god help us, Philip Morris is urging the youth of America to “take a puff, it’s springtime,” and the Centrum Silver and Viagra folks start pushing Boomers to reconnect with their lost youth, some of the charm will go out of the enterprise, that’s for sure. Stoners give way to stone-cold. Harsh!

As for the Arc angels, they’re looking forward to:

“…the day when not a single adult in the world is punished for this plant. With deep industry experience, The ArcView Group is ushering in the next generation of cannabis-related businesses.” (Source: ArcView Group.)

At present, there are over 75 investors in their network, “who gather at least once per quarter to evaluate the best opportunities for investment.”

Now that must be some fun! And the price of entry is only $50K.

There is a palpable camaraderie among the members and everyone values from the knowledge, experience and skills that each other brings to the table.

Bet that occasionally someone brings something else to the table.

I get that they’re boring, but why are they sad? In defense of black pants.

A few weeks back, some not-so-sweet young thing over on Business Week had a rant – her word or BW editorial’s -  entitled “Ladies, Please Burn Your Black Work Pants.”

Here’s the hortatory opening:

Ladies, take off your pants. Those black, poly-blend, straight-legged slacks you wear to work every day. You know the ones—they gap at the waist and pull at the crotch. They make a distinct scratching sound when you cross and uncross your legs in a meeting. Sometimes they have pleats. Sometimes they have back pockets. Sometimes they have stretch. But they’re never, ever flattering. They’re boring and sad, and they make you look boring and sad, too.

Well, I’ll give Emma Rosenblum that black pants are boring, but why are they sad?

Most of the working women I know who are in the on-beyond-dedicated-follower-of-fashion cohorts (40-something through 60-something) wear black pants to work, if not regularly, then on occasion. Okay, they may not be those scratchy poly ones, but they are, nonetheless, black pants.

For my corhort, we’re not talking women who weekend in outsized Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirts, or who have a drawer full of mom jeans. We’re talking about reasonably well put together women with good taste who pride themselves on looking, in not cutting-edge, then non-frumpy. They are not the type to appear in a Glamour Don’t with their face blanked out. (Rosenblum came to Business Week from Glamour, where, I suppose, what you wore actually mattered to someone.) My gals are decidedly not past caring, but are decidedly past caring enough about what some young snip thinks about them to race off and “experiment with bright colors and different shapes.”

Admittedly, I’d like to experiment with a different personal shape – oh, those extra 10 lbs! – but even if I managed to shed those surly bonds of weight, I don’t think any of my clients would be jazzed to see me show up in bright colored pants. Not after all those years of acclimating them to black/navy/charcoal/sage pants, often paired with a pretty exciting top, if I do say so myself.  But the last thing that working women of a certain age need is to start experimenting. Just because some arbiter declares elephant bells are back doesn’t make it right.

No, the women I know are focused on work clothing that’s attractive enough, while also functional, practical, and a morning non-decision.

Ladies (and gentlemen), I give you the black pant.

Which Rosenblum snidely characterizes as a “shapeless” blot on the office fashion scene which has, since it became the uniform during the 1990’s, “remained as a particularly determined stain.”

And here’s why women have adopted this “particularly determined stain.”

For many of the women on the early end of my black-pants-wearing cohort, their mornings begin with wrestling their kids into their outfits. As in, yes, Otis, you can choose the orange shirt with the tractor or the Spider Man ensemble, hoping that this little choice ruse will detract little Otis from his original intent, which was to go to pre-K stark naked.

As they age up in the cohort, my gals will look at the price tag – $278 – of the Kate Spade New York Ali Trouser (which “is a less intimidating version of the wide pants seen on the runway”) and decide that the money would be better off going towards the college book bill. As for being “willing to spend more than $500” on Jil Sander, well… That’s the Thanksgiving ticket home. Not that they wouldn’t love a pair of Jil Sander’s trousers. I bought a Jil Sander skirt at Off Fifth in 2001 and it’s still a three-season go-to for me. Still, that’s a lot of loot for a pair of pants.

Take the great leap forward another decade and the women I know are worrying about elder-care for their parents, and don’t really have the time to focus on what they’re wearing to work. They just want to look decent. Not to mention they don’t want to have something so pricey that they’re afraid to get grandkid spit up on it. Plus, both elder parents and grandkids (up to a certain age, I’m afraid) will be happy to see them, no matter what they have on.

Plus, let’s face it, most of us don’t work in a place where we have to be all that fashionista to begin with.

My career’s been in technology, where I’ve always been something of a fashion plate. ‘Nuf said.

“The standard ‘woman’s trouser’ is just depressing,” says Jessica Morgan, one half of style bloggers the Fug Girls. “If you work at a company where you can’t get away with jeans or a leather legging-pant, it’s dark days out there.”

One good thing about high tech, I suppose, is that jeans are pretty much okay. At least on Fridays.

But I don’t see that “it’s dark days” anywhere where you can’t get away with “a leather legging-pant” – which doesn’t sound like anything most of us should be wearing to begin with.

…“it’s hard to concentrate on your work if you are constantly wondering about the status of your pant fit,” says Simon Doonan, the creative ambassador-at-large at Barneys New York.

I must say that, throughout my career, there have been plenty of distractions that kept me from concentrating on the work before me, but “constantly wondering about the status of [my] pant fit” was never one of them.

These days, part of my non-work work entails regularly hanging out at the MGH infusion center. Mostly I wear jeans. Or khakis. But I have been known to wear black pants on occasion. And I suspect that neither my husband nor the chemo nurses have noticed.

While I’m hanging around the MGH infusion center, an old and dear friend is being treated with chemo in Providence.

Her investment for this round was a taupe cashmere track suit which I suspect won’t win any fashion awards, but which sounds exceedingly comfy. And probably looks quite stylin’ when paired with the robin’s egg blue cashmere scarf I sent her to go along with it.

At least she’s not wearing the dreaded black pants! Which is, of course, a lot of what she wears in her real (non-chemo) life.

They may be boring, but I have to say that, once you log much time with cancer patients, you’d hardly characterize black pants as sad…

Ah, to be young and have nothing better to do than rant about what us old ladies wear to work!

There’s a pawn shop, on a corner, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, errr, I mean Manhattan

Not that I’ve ever used one, but I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of pawn shops.

No, not intrigued enough to watch Pawn Stars, but still…

When I think Pawn Shop I think:

• Scag-addict musician pawning his trombone
• Gambler paying off his bookie with his pinky ring
• Single mom unloading her wedding ring (not worth as much as she hoped)

My mental image is never star or rich person.

But if you are a star or rich person, and have a Rolex or a Marc Chagall or a David Hockney or an MTV award statue or a Michael Jackson glove, and you’re a bit short on the benjamins, you don’t need to furtively slink into some scummy storefront with or without the three pawn-shop balls. No, you can get thee to New York Loan, “Pawn Shop to the Stars.”

New York Loan Company is an upscale collateral lender (pawn shop), specializing in large pawn loans against gold, jewelry, diamonds, watches, fine art and entertainment memorabilia.

New York Loan also sells jewelry and watches at “dealer prices” to the public from the discreet International Gem Tower. We have been coined by the media as the “Pawn Shop to the Stars,” as a result of our high-end clientele and our emphasis on safety and customer confidentiality.  Although we have been asked by many reporters, from People Magazine to CNN to the Today Show, to reveal names, we have never done so and we never will – your security and privacy is our number one concern.

Since 1938, New York Loan Company has been, and remains, the premier pawn shop in the United States. (Source: NY Loan)

Well, if I were going to pick a year to get into the high-end pawn broking business, 1938 would be right up there, that’s for sure.

The poor folk slammed by the depression would already have gone to the corner pawn shop and pawned the only pot they had to piss in so that they could buy a flivver and drive through the dustbowl to California, where – if they could hang on for a couple of years – they could get high paying jobs in the WWII defense industry.

By 1938, it would be the more affluent who were looking to pawn pater’s watch, mater’s silver, and the gold medal they’d won for hurling Indian clubs at the 1924 Olympics. Or an Oscar for the first talkie.

New York Loan Company specializes in awards (Emmys, Golden Globes and MTV Moonmen), costumes, musical instruments and signed articles from both living and deceased artists ranging from Greta Garbo to Madonna and from Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson.  If your collectible belonged to an icon in the world of music (the Beatles), film (Marilyn Monroe) or television (Lucille Ball) we are here to help.

In addition, we will make pawn loans against sports memorabilia, including championship rings or belts, and autographed jerseys, gloves or balls.  

We even make pawn loans against political memorabilia, ranging from letters written by Kennedy to dresses belonging to Princess Diana.

Kind of weird that Lucille Ball memorabilia is up there with the Beatles, Elvis, Marilyn, and MJ, but I suppose there’s someone out there who’d pay big bucks for the peasant dresses that Lucy and Ethel wore when they stomped the grapes, or for one of Ricky Ricardo’s conga drums.

As for sports memorabilia, if only my father had hung on to that Mickey Mantle (or was it Roger Maris) bat the he caught at a game when the Yankees were playing the Tigers in 1961, the year that Mantle and Maris contested the Babe Ruth home run record. It’s not as if the bat slipped out of his hands. Al was an athlete: he caught it. But he thought it would be a pain in the butt to try to bring the bat home in his Samsonite suit case, so he gave it to the businessman he’d gone to the game with. (My sister and I were told the story about this treasure, but were sworn to secrecy in terms of revealing it to my brothers. We all, however, enjoyed a real in-person baseball experience that year. We were at Fenway for a Red Sox-Yankees game, and Maris and Mantle homered back-to back. Mantle-Maris bat during that signal year: impressive. Seeing The Mick and Maris go back-to-back: priceless.)

Anyway, New York Loan is a spin out of Beverly Hills Loan, which is actually the entity that’s been around since 1938, serving the stars discreetly since the Depression.

Whether they’re in New York or Beverly Hills, apparently the rich folks need to be able to tap a pawnbroker when they’re tapped out.

Somebody hocked this one:

Is it just me, or would you not have been nuts to have this in your possession to begin with?

Anyway, it’s an interesting business. And I guess this just goes to show that the rich aren’t really different than you and me. Sometimes they’re living from paycheck to paycheck, and just have to unload an award statue, a bit of bling, or an angel-devil portrait of Michael Jackson.

I knew that Dick Fuld (late of Lehman) had to unload his art collection. But pawn brokers for rich folks? Who knew?

Unfortunately – for us gawkers – New York Loan has zipped its ip in terms of revealing their clientele. But it might be fun to hang out at their digs on West 47th to see who shows up carrying a bundle, and leaving with a bundle that’s, in truth, worth a lot less.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

Lucky me!

I may not have anything worth pawning, but, then again, I don’t need to visit a pawn shop, either.

These little town blues…ADM bids Decatur adieu

Apparently the executives at Archer Daniel Midlands got sick of the smell of soy sauce. Of eating at the same couple of restaurants. Of driving three hours to get to an airport with runways that can accommodate a 737, a theater playing the touring production of Jersey Boys, a Justin Bieber concert. Of having no place to shop where you don’t get met at the door by an aging greeter in a polyester vest. Of living in a city that was last home to a professional sporting team in 1920, when the Decatur Staleys – named after the local starch producer – (Walter) decamped to Chicago to start bearing down as the Chicago Bears. Of having their recruits turn up there nose at coming to Decatur – and not just at that smell of soy sauce.

Maybe they just plain didn’t want to live in what is the largest city in the United States:

…without citywide mandatory trash service. Trash service, although mandated by ordinance, is strictly voluntary and handled by private contractors, not unlike a small town level of service. Resultingly, city staff issued estimates in 2010 that over 2,000 residential addresses have no trash service and widespread dumping in alleys has been described by the Macon County Health Department as a major public health hazard. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Well, that an the lack of nearby ocean would be enough to scratch Decatur off of my list, but there’s something to be said about a city that has as its motto: "Decatur, We Like it Here."

Modest, understated, decidedly non-pompous.

This self-effacing tagline replaced the slightly more boastful and puffed-up "The Pride of the Prairie".

There’s a third motto in the running as well. That’s the unofficial one: “The Soybean Capital of the World,” which is a bit more plausible and defensible than some of Boston’s unofficial tags: “Hub of the Universe” (how so?), “Athens of America” (in just which respect?).

Boston’s official motto doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue: “Sicut patribus, sit deus nobis.” (Translation: "God be with us as he was with our fathers.")

As for Decatur, whatever it calls itself, it will no longer be the HQ of Archer Daniels Midland.Last week, ADM execs:

…called 15 civic leaders to lunch…to break the news that it's moving its headquarters—along with about 100 jobs—to a bigger city. (Source: Wall Street Journal.)

Which. from the Decaturian perspective, was bad news – good news: the humiliation of getting dumped as ADM’s corporate headquarters, but the relief that they’ll only be losing 100 jobs. (Of course, the folks filling those 100 jobs are the types that are apt to do things like sit on the local hospital board, chair the United Way, support the good restaurants in town…)

Reminders of the company and its products are ubiquitous in Decatur…from the Soy City Motel to the Soy Capital Bank to the main radio station, WSOY. ADM's plants turn soybeans, corn and other crops into products like fuel and food additives and animal feed. The ones in Decatur also produce a noticeable aroma. "Some days, it smells like old french fries, and other days like soy sauce," said one employee.

AMD has had its HQ in Decatur since 1969. Prior to that it was in Minneapolis. (Ah, the good old days, when a company would move from a reasonably large and cosmopolitan area to Smallville.)

AMD hasn’t declared where it’s going just yet. Chicago is in the running (and is a logical choice – driving distance to the soy beans, and home to everything anyone could possibly want in a city, with the exception of the ocean and some hills, and, for the namby-pamby types afraid of seasons, good weather).

Some Decaturites bristle at the suggestion that their town doesn't have enough to offer….

"There is a ton of stuff going on," said John Hawkins [of]  Doherty's [Pub and Pins]. "We have a zoo, and it's getting penguins. And there is great theater" in a nearby town. By contrast, "Drive 20 miles south, and you'll see a Podunk town. That's the middle of nowhere."

Did I really need a snobby Wall Street Journal reporter to put that quote about “getting penguins” in front of a snob like me?

I’m quite certain that the Decatur zoo-going public will completely and utterly enjoy those penguins, which are quite the charming little creatures to observe.

Alas, when it came to keeping AMD execs in town, the ‘guins were unfortunately too little, too late.

Honey Don’t

As long as no one gets killed in the process, who doesn’t like a good international adulterated food scandal, and this one’s a real honey.

ALW Food Group is a German food-trading company with an outpost in Chicago, where the focus was on honey imports.

Americans consume an awful lot of honey, and much of it is imported, so the U.S. is a logical place for a German company that trades in honey to set up shop. We import from plenty of countries, but one of them isn’t China. China got triple-tariffed a while back because they were flooding the market with deliberately low-priced honey. There’s also the matter of the purity of their product.

Nonetheless, ALW found a way in which they could bring in illegal Chinese honey by masking its origins – and make a bundle in the process. Such a bundle that, when prosecutors swarmed in they found the biggest food fraud case in U.S. history.

ALW had an elaborate plan to disguise their scheme:

ALW relied on a network of brokers from China and Taiwan, who shipped honey from China to India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The 50-gallon drums would be relabeled in these countries and sent on to the U.S. Often the honey was filtered to remove the pollen, which could help identify its origin. Some of the honey was adulterated with rice sugar, molasses, or fructose syrup.(Source: Business Week)

Here’s an example of how they worked with one broker:

The broker, a small-time businessman from Taiwan named Michael Fan, had already received advice from ALW about how to get Chinese honey into the U.S. ALW executives had told him to ship his honey in black drums since the Chinese usually used green ones. And they had reminded him that the “taste should be better than regular mainland material.” Chinese honey was often harvested early and dried by machine rather than bees. This allowed the bees to produce more honey, but the honey often had an odor and taste similar to sauerkraut. Fan was told to mix sugar and syrup into the honey in Taiwan to dull the pungent flavor.

Honey with the odor and taste of sauerkraut? Why bother to try to foist it off on Americans? You’d think this would be a natural for the German market.

“Ach, this honey tastes and smells just vonderful, don’t you think so, liebchen?”

Anyway, most of those indicted are in Germany, where they’re out of reach of the not-so-long arm of the American law.

But I guess this means that there’ll be no trips to Disneyworld for them anytime soon. And “they are no Interpol’s list of wanted people.”

As so often happens, the junior worker-bees stationed in Chicago became the fall guys.

Stefanie Giesselbach and Magnus von Buddenbrock (now if that’s not a monocle an dueling scar name, I don’t know what is) were both convicted of wrongdoing. Despite cooperating with the investigation, Giesselbach ended up spending a year in prison, and von Buddenbrock spent six-months wearing an ankle bracelet.

Not that this duo were entirely innocent:

After Fan’s honey shipment was confiscated, an ALW executive wrote to Giesselbach and her colleagues: “I request that all recipients not to write e-mail about this topic. Please OVER THE TELEPHONE and in German! Thank you!”

Oh, yes, please use the telephone and speak German because the U.S. never taps phones during criminal investigations, and no one in the U.S. speaks German, especially in Chicago.

Nonetheless, Giesselbach and executives in Hamburg, Hong Kong, and Beijing continued to use e-mail for sensitive discussions about the mislabeled honey. When Yan Yong Xiang, an established honey broker from China they called the “famous Mr. Non Stop Smoker,” was due to visit Chicago, Giesselbach received an e-mail. “Topic: we do not say he is shipping the fake stuff. But we can tell him that he should be careful on this topic + antibiotics.” E-mails mention falsifying reports from a German lab, creating fake documents for U.S. customs agents, finding new ways to pass Chinese honey through other countries, and setting up a Chinese company that would be eligible to apply for lower tariffs. Giesselbach comes across as accommodating, unquestioning, and adept.

Although just following orders is not a great excuse, it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the two young ALW drones.

Once they were arrested, ALW closed up shop in the U.S. and left Giesselbach and von Buddenbrock hanging.

In the words of  defense attorney T. Markus Funk – another great name there - 

“I feel that Stefanie and Magnus got the rough end of the pineapple.”

Von Buddenbrock was at least spared prison time. And it seems as if the brief time he spent in jail after his arrest was something of an orange jumpsuit lark:

“I was tense and nervous,” says von Buddenbrock. “But I managed to get along. I speak Spanish. I like soccer.” He played Monopoly with someone’s contraband dice. He got to know Joey Lombardo, the mafia boss. “He gave me a recommendation for an Italian restaurant.”

After his six-months with the ankle bracelet, the insouciant von Buddenbrock self-deported. (And we used to make fun of Mitt Romney…) Giesselbach has done her time, and is being deported by us. I doubt she’ll be back in any big hurry.

Meanwhile, the operation’s queen bees get to sit around the hive in Germany, buzzing about their innocence.

For some, life is always going to be sweeter than it is for others.

En garde, Garde Robe!

I live in an old building, vintage well before folks had a lot of clothing. Especially Boston folks.

One of our closets is so skimpy that we have to put the hangers in on the diagonal.

While there is an advantage to having limited closet space – you just can’t accumulate all that much stuff – I will admit that there have been plenty of times when I have wished we had just one more modest-sized closet. I’m not greedy. I don’t need a walk-in closet or anything that grand. But a closet that you didn’t have to put things in at a slant would be nice.

But, in truth, it’s not that I need all that much more space.

And even if I did, it would just hold more of my jumble of L.L. Bean, Talbot’s, Eileen Fisher and Nordstrom piece (my high end!), or the occasional funky-artsy thang. I most certainly don’t have the kind of wardrobe that merits renting out space at Garde Robe to store my wardrobe in. (Not that they’re in Boston, anyway…) Certainly nothing that merits this sort of TLC:

Doug Greenberg, one of Garde Robe's partners, tells the Times that his clients "are wise enough to protect [their clothing] like a piece of art." And that art is well-protected: Garde Robe boasts security to rival fine jeweler Harry Winston's, and "each item that comes in for storage is inspected for dirt or other contaminants, sterilized, photographed and cataloged in a database." (Source: Huffington Post, citing a piece that appeared in The New York Times.)

I suppose that if you have “investment” clothing, designer goods that are actually worth something, it’s worth paying the $4,200 a year minimum – amusingly reported in the initial article as $4.2K per month – for the minimum accommodation, which holds:

…50 items of clothing, 10 pairs of shoes and a box of accessories.

But, hey, I don’t have 50 items of clothing that are worth sterilizing or cataloging, even if I do fit into at least one part of the Garde Robe demographic:

…fashion devotees with extensive and beautiful wardrobes, city residents with inadequate closet space, business travelers and globetrotters, multiple home owners, and fashion designers. (Source: Garde Robe)

Or I would fit that “city residents” demo, if I lived in NYC instead of fashion-backward Boston.

Garde Robe^® members enjoy 24/7 visual access to items in our care and can request garment delivery via Garde Robe's signature Cyber Closets.

Hmmmm. Does this mean that they have nanny cams that let you monitor your sterilized and decontaminated garments, round the clock? I already have 24/7 visual and tactile access to my wardrobe. All I need to do is open the closet door, or pull out one of the under-the-bed sweater drawers.

As for the Cyber Closet, I really don’t need a “digital look-book”

… accessible on the Internet, where you can view and sort individual pieces, create categories for certain items, create outfits, and much more.

Wondering just who and what is garde robed?

Here are Ivanka Trump’s empire-waist dresses, Gwyneth Paltrow’s couture gowns, the model Iman’s cashmere car coats and a shoe collection belonging to an Oscar-winning filmmaker who prefers to remain anonymous.

Also here, occupying several racks, is Oscar de la Renta’s complete archive of ready-to-wear collections, dating back to his first in 1965. (Source: NY Times)

All told, there are 30,000 items stored in the Garde Robe facility, which is located in the somewhat downside Queens, in a “warehouse [that us] is under 24-hour surveillance.”

As befits the schmatas of Ivanka and Gwyneth.

Garde Robe has about 300 members, including a billionaire real estate magnate and his wife, who store 3,000 pieces at a cost of more than $150,000 a year.

I was going to say head-on-pike, but I’ll leave it at “no comment.”

Kim Akhtar, who created Garde Robe, is a pretty interesting character, one “who helped manage the English rock band the Cure and later became Dan Rather’s personal assistant.” (What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Just google Dan Rather and frequency if you don’t get the reference.)

The concept came to her after she found herself paying a couple of thousand bucks to store her winter clothes at the dry cleaners, and forgetting exactly what it was that she owned. As a result, she went out and bought a black cashmere cardigan, even though she already had one. (Been there, done that, only with a periwinkle cashmere pullover. And I don’t even have the excuse of it being stored off-site.)

Anyway, Ms. Akhtar has sold her business and:

…moved to Spain to pursue another passion, flamenco dancing, under the stage name La Maha.

Gosh, not only is my wardrobe dull and boring, but so am I…

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A tip of the non-designer hat to my sister Trish, who sent this story my way. Trish also lives in an old, closet-challenged house, which she’s somewhat overcome with a good-sized Ikea wardrobe.

And a happy birthday greeting to my sister Kath.

September is sewing month. So what, you say?

Today is the last day on which to celebrate National Sewing Month.

As I look back at the month, I will note that I did a bit of sewing: a button on a pair of black slacks, a few stitches to a pink cable-knit sweater where the body of the sweater was separating from the neck trim. I used thread and needle from my very own, fully-equipped  sewing basket – a basket that’s pretty ugly (if there’s a way to make butterflies appear unattractive, the designers of my basket succeeded in finding it), but which I hang on to because my mother gave it to me.

My sewing basket doubles as a button box in which I keep the spare buttons and wisps of yarn that come with sweaters. Now that I think of it, it would also make a logical repository for all the mini-sewing kits I accumulated from hotel stays over the years. One more little item for the to-do list.

My mother always kept a separate button box, a round reddish-purplish tin box with flowers on the cover, and she’d allow us to look through it from time to time, examining the dozens of different colors and shapes of buttons she had saved there. I loved sifting through the button box, and if that sounds like something straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder, all I can say is, back in the day there were only three channels on your black and white TV, and there was only so much to do when you were stuck in doors on a rainy day.

The buttons in my mother’s button box were the extras that came with a set she would have  purchased for one of her sewing projects, or would have been stripped from an item of clothing that was destined for the rag bag. For years I, too, stripped the buttons from garments that were too awful to donate anywhere and were just going into the trash. (Let’s face it, I don’t need rags like my mother did.) That was until I took a good look at myself, old fashioned razor blade in hand, sawing away at the thread attaching that little white button to a button down shirt and asked, What in god’s name are you doing?

Anyway, other than the occasional minor repair or hemming job, I don’t sew. But I did grow up during The Great Sewing Your Own Clothes Era. At least it was that era in my house.

As I said, it’s not as if I ever sewed.

I did take sewing lessons at the Girls Club, but all I ever made was what I guess was a sleeveless muu-muu. I remember the pattern quite vividly: purple and green calico cats on an ecru background. And I have a quite vivid recall of my having sewed the yoke on crooked, so that it only appeared even if I hunched my right shoulder up. I’m not sure what the original purpose of the garment was – beach cover-up? – but it never made it out of the house.

If I had intended it as a beach cover-up, it was with ample reason, as one of the items my mother took it upon to sew for my sister Kathleen and I was a bathing suit. One of these beauties was blue and white striped ticking, with red rick-rack trim, the other a turquoise, black, and white geometric design. Neither one was exactly au courant for the early sixties, when every other girl had a tank suit or a madras two piece. The ticking one would not have been out of place on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, circa 1920.

Neither fabric was not exactly designed for frolicking in the water, either.

The ticking, in particular, absorbed water like a sponge and, unless you could manage to bunch up some sort of air pocket – not all that difficult, given that my mother believed that a bathing suit on an early-teen girl should pass the Amish mother modesty test – you sunk like a rock. Talk about don’t go near the water.

Most of my mother’s sewing jobs were not this awful. Some of the outfits she made us were actually quite stylin’. I had a nice paisley dress that even looked as if it could have come from a store.

We weren’t the only ones with home-sewn clothing, of course.

Kath and I were friends with a sister pair, the Shea girls, and one year we all wore matching corduroy jumpers for the fist day of school – one of the few days we didn’t have to wear matching green gabardine jumpers. Mine was a very nice royal blue, and I wore it with a blue and white striped blouse that was store-bought.

(Earlier on, my mother had taken apart my father’s naval uniforms and made us – that would be me and Kath; somehow, boys are exempt from home-made clothing, and Trish was not yet on the scene – shorts out of the whites, and spring coats out of the blues.)

In the Age of Sewing at Home, it was actually fun to look through the pattern books – Vogue and McCall - and pick out fabrics, but I will say that once I had the money to buy my own clothing, that’s the route I took.

And, unlike my sisters Kath and Trish, I never did learn how to sew.

One of Trish’s endeavors, while she was in high school, was making a nice plaid wool jacket. For me. In the course of stitching it up, she ran her thumb under the needle, necessitating a trip to the emergency room, as I recall. I’m still squeamish when I think of that incident…

I don’t think either Kath or Trish do much sewing these days, other than running up an occasional pair of curtains.

Trish did make her daughter Molly a kick-ass bee costume when Mols was two or three years old. Although Molly originally resisted putting it on – needless to say, much to Trish’s frustration – my brother-in-law was eventually able to convince her to wear it. Wish I had a picture to scan in here: it was ultra cute.

With the cost of clothing so low – thank you China,  Bangladesh, Vietnam – and the growing emphasis on quantity over quality, I don’t imagine as many people sew their own any more. Maybe in states that have big 4-H groups and state fairs…

Whatever the current state of sewing in America. I am happy to salute those who get on their Singers and sew.

Just be sure to make sure you don’t run your thumb under the needle.

Bowlinged Over: Counter Evolution puts some old alleys to good use

The two coolest old bowling alleys I’ve ever seen were both in Maine.

One was on Kezar Lake, in a cottage enclave on the grounds of what was once the summer retreat site of the Diamond Match Company. The enclave had a clubhouse that featured an old-timey bowling alley with a couple of wobbly old wooden lanes. Way cool.

The other was in Boothbay Harbor, and was an altogether excellent little bowling alley – I’m pretty sure it was candlepin, to boot (this is, after all, New England). This alley was so quaint I almost expected to see a group of keglers straight out of Rip Van Winkle rolling away. How excellent was this bowling alley? It even had unscreened wooden-shuttered windows that opened out onto the street so you could stick your head in and catch the action.

I didn’t bowl at either alley. (My husband and niece did at the latter, however.)

Then, again, I’ve never been much of a bowler.

I’ve been bowling on occasion, but it’s not something that I grew up with.

No one I knew went bowling, placing it pretty much in the category of pogo sticks and pinball machines: you knew they existed, but that was about it.

I don’t know if either the Kezar or Boothbay Harbor alleys are still standing, but if they’re on their way out, Jim Malone of Counter Evolution can put those old wooden alleys to good use.

He takes wood from old bowling lanes and turns it into tables, chairs and benches.

His Brooklyn-based CounterEvolution makes pieces that can be found as the counters and tabletops of restaurants and coffee shops in New York and around the country. (Source: WSJ.)

Malone didn’t start out in the bowling alley conversion business. He was a singer-songwriter and, later, worked “as the voice director for the English-dubbed version of "Pokemon" and other anime shows.” (Why is everyone else’s résumé is always so much more interesting than mine? I do have combat boot polisher and Durgin-Park waitress on the long-form, but still…)

But Malone seen his opportunities and he took ‘em.

Those opportunities included the general decline of the bowling industry – as in Bowling Alone – and the particular demise of the wooden bowling alley, which have been almost fully replaced by synthetic materials.

As lanes have closed, demolition crews and lumber companies have sought out CounterEvolution and others to find new uses for the bowling-alley wood.

“I may not compost, but I'm definitely doing something that has a positive impact on the environment," said Mr. Malone.

The designs are not in the least bit hokey – no legs made out of bowling pins. The table pictured here (the Kingpin) is quite lovely.

Much of his work is done for commercial customers: the salad chain Sweetgreen, Shake Shack, and Starbucks. The Starbucks in Davis Square, Cambridge, has a testimonial on the Counter Evolution site,. I’ll have to stop in and check it out next time I’m in Davis Square.

Malone doesn’t just repurpose bowling alleys, but reclaims wood from other tear-downs, as well.

He’s making his furniture in Brooklyn, and will be opening a retail outlet in Manhattan later this year. His mission, by the way, isn’t to become some green fanatic, where anything goes as long as it’s green (i.e., ignore the aesthetic and defy people to have the audacity to declare something ugly if it’s eco-friendly). Malone mostly wants to make things that are beautiful and functional.

He’s also doing something that gladdens the hearts of owners of defunct bowling alleys.

Dave Mitcheltree, whose family owned a 32-lane bowling center in South Chicago Heights, Ill., lost AMF as a tenant amid the company's bankruptcy proceeding and had a hard time finding someone else to run the business. He connected with Mr. Malone and agreed to saw up about 1,300 square feet of the heart pine, load it onto a flatbed truck and send it to Brooklyn.

"The idea that it is going to be used in furniture just makes me feel good," Mr. Mitcheltree said.

If I knew Jim Malone were going to be making something out of that bowling alley from Boothbay Harbor, I might be tempted to start saving up. We could use a new coffee table.

Let’s hear it for the Hack Bureau

Last Saturday, we took a cab from JFK to our temporary (one week) home away on the Upper East Side. In terms of coming into The City, the timing wasn’t perfect. Unbeknownst to us, the Steuben Day Parade – which celebrates all things German (well, not all things German: just the good ones) – was blitzing down Fifth Avenue, causing all sorts of traffic tie ups. And the UES – that’s Upper East Side to you provincials – was crawling with Steuben Day revelers, recognizable by their dirndls, lederhosen, and some get-up that made the men wearing it look like chimney sweeps.

Anyway, the cab dropped us off  amid mega-traffic, yelling cops (yelling at us, or at least at our cabbie), tipsy lederhosers, honking cabs, etc.Foolishly, amidst this chaos, I decided to conserve our cash – and why not, it being nearly impossible to find an ATM in a pokey little town like this – and use the credit card system in the back of the cab. This decision was doubly foolish, given that, on the way in from JFK, I had remarked to my husband how cloudy the screen was on the all-purpose information screen now present in all cabs. And aren’t these devices such a welcome addition to the cab ride experience? After all, we wouldn’t want to be deprived of diversion for a nano-second, would we? In this case, the “entertainment” was a perpetual Jimmy Fallon-Brian Williams  loop that repeated every 3 minutes or so. I tuned Jimmy Fallon out, but Bri -  who I’m kind of sweet on, so I couldn’t just tune him out -  was talking about how wunderbar the folks out in Colorado were for jumping in to help out their flooded-out fellow citizen, I couldn’t actually see Bri, as the screen – the same screen that’s used to take care of a fare-paying credit card transaction –was very blurry. And the decision to pay by credit card, rather than fork over the cash, was triply foolish given that my husband – now standing outside the cab with our bags, while another couple, anxious to get away from the Steuben Tag-ers, were trying to get into the cab – was yelling at me to just pay cash.

But once I started down the path of paying by credit card, well…

Did I mention that the screen was cloudy-blurry?

Coached by the cabbie, whose English was not quite of the highest order (I kept trying to explain to him that I couldn’t read what was on the screen, while he kept telling me something I couldn’t comprehend), I put in the amount, swiped the card, and – fortunately – asked for a receipt.

As we settled into our digs, I mentally recalculated the amount I had just paid, and realized that I hadn’t given the cabbie as large a tip as I would normally have, having added in a total amount without taking into consideration the surcharge amount.

Oh, well, I told myself, I would always make it up next time…

Little did I know…

Several hours later, I happened to glance at the receipt and saw that what I thought I had entered as the total amount had been entered as the tip – a tip that was $55 more than I would have given.

So I quickly went from worrying about whether I’d been a cheapskate to kicking myself for not being able to read the blurry/cloudy screen.

I immediately called the credit card company, and they tried to get through to the reporting number that they had for the cab company, which, alas, was closed for the day. The fellow from Capital One gave me the number and suggested I call on Monday. He told me that if I couldn’t get it cleared up, I should call back and start disputing the charge.

Anyway, I called the number the Cliff at Capital One – who was very helpful, by the way; think what you will about Crapital One, but they have excellent customer service – had given me, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t the cab company, but the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, formerly known as the Hack Bureau.

Since I had what they told me was going to be a 19 minute wait – to which adviso my mental response was ‘yeah, right’ – I had plenty of time to anticipate just what a lovely experience I was going to have communicating with what was, by any other name, the Hack Bureau.

Precisely 19 minutes into my wait, a woman came on the line and quite pleasantly asked how she could help me.

I explained the situation – emphasizing that I was not reporting an “incident”, i.e., did not feel that the cabbie/cab company had tried to screw me. Fortunately, the receipt had all the detail one might want or need (except for the phone number of the cab company) including the key bits of information: the medallion and hack numbers. The TLC woman – who I was now thinking of as part of TLC, rather than a Hack Bureau Apparatchik –  immediately put me through to the cabbie’s phone number, suggesting that I leave a message using my first name only, and let him know what the problem was. Given his limitations with English, and mine with Urdu, I didn’t think that this was going to work out all that well, but I followed her advice. She then put me through to the cab company itself, where I was able to explain what had happened to the manager there. He took down the information, asked me what I wanted the tip to be – which I upped to be a bit higher than my 20% norm – and he told me what refund he would put through.

As we concluded the call, I said, “Thank you, New York cab bureau lady, if you’re still on the line.” She said, “Yes I am, and my name is Valerie.”

So  thank you Valerie. You were pleasant, courteous, thorough, clear and good humored. And I just want on the TLC web site to let the commisioner know.

So far, the refund from the cab company has not yet gone through. Nonetheless, Valerie has restored my faith in people in general and government workers in particular.

Football, football, rah-rah-rah. (Block those taxes!)

Sometimes I surprise myself.

As I did when I read an article that started out:

If you're planning to attend Super Bowl XLVIII this February…

Never say never, but I suspect I’m as likely to attend a NASCAR event, or the Iditarod, or the World Series of Poker, as I am to attend a Super Bowl.

It’s not that I don’t like football. I do. Kinda, sorta. Mostly. More or less.

It’s just that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I never saw another football game, live or Memorex. I just wouldn’t miss it at all.

And that goes double for Super Bowl.

Sometimes I watch it. Kinda, sorta.

If the Patriots are in, I mostly watch. Unless, of course, Tom Brady gets sacked for a safety on the first possession, at which point I make the call: here and no further. No commercial, however clever, is going to make it worth my while enough to sit through this debacle.

A pretty good indicator of what little interest I have in SB is the fact that, in 2010, when Green Bay won, we turned off the half-time show to watch a re-run special, which we had already seen, on the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Such was our level of interest in the Super Bowl that we stuck with a show we’d already seen, about an event the outcome of which we were 100% certain, and enjoyed it more than we were enjoying that ultimate of real-time sporting events: The Super Bowl.

Come to think of it, of the major professional sports (and I’ll even include soccer, tennis, golf, and – god help us – wrestling), football is the one I’ve never seen in person. (I DO NOT count boxing.)

I suppose if the weather were perfect, and someone gave me a ticket for free, and I had a hotel room in walking distance of the stadium, I’d go to a professional football game…

Anyway, I guess it’s pretty clear that, no, I’m not planning on attending Super Bowl XLVIII, or any other Super Bowl, anytime soon. (While I’m at it, what’s with that pompous use of Roman numerals?)

Nonetheless, I read the remainder of the article and learned that, when Super Bowl comes into the cold this February, for an old-fashioned outdoor game in an inclement weather location (Giants’ home field in New Jersey), things are going to get pricey.

The NFL is on the verge of approving a plan that would more than double the prices the league charges for the most coveted Super Bowl tickets. According to three league officials familiar with the plan, club-level seats in the mezzanine with access to indoor restaurants are likely to cost about $2,600—a mammoth hike from last year's game in New Orleans, where the top tickets went for $1,250.

The next-cheapest tranche of seats (those in the lower bowl) would cost about $1,500, the executives said, up from $950 for the second-tier seats sold in New Orleans.(Source: WSJ.)

(While I’m at it, what’s with that pompous use of the word “tranche”?)

The NFL – poor dears – is just trying to capture some of the value they’re losing to fans who decide not to go, and to ticket brokers, the legitimate scalpers who grab a mitt-ful of tickets and plump up the prices. (I suppose I could start WSJ-ing it up and throw in terms like dead-weight loss, and Pareto’s optimum, and demand curve. But that would be pompous. And I’d probably get it all wrong, anyway.)

I’m fine with the NFL charging whatever the market can bear for their tickets. Why not?

This isn’t exactly an average fan event, to begin with. Like most big deal sporting events, Super Bowl has got corporate written all over it.

The result is that a large portion of the audience at any Super Bowl consists of people who are attending the game on someone else's dime.

So the average fan can watch from the comfort of his couch, paying far less for his own nachos and Buds, and peeing in his very own toilet.

Interesting, even among those fans who manage to score tickets, a lot of them would rather be able to watch, nosh, and pee in peace:

At the last Super Bowl, the league held a lottery for $600 tickets in the upper bowl in the corners of the end zones—drawing some 30,000 entries. But of the 500 winners, the NFL said, 60% flipped their tickets within 24 hours. This season, the NFL plans to raffle off 1,000 $500 tickets—but those tickets will be non-transferrable.

Apparently, there’s still plenty of untapped value for the NFL to tap:

According to the NFL, research on the secondary market during the 2013 Super Bowl shows many $600 tickets sold for $2,000 while seats near midfield went for up to $6,100 and premium club seats changed hands for $6,400—both multiples of their face value.

So it looks like those-who-scalp will still be able to extract a few bucks on the secondary market. Bless the generous little heart of the NFL!

Part of the NFL’s argument for raising prices this year is that the game is being played in the NY metro where there are a lot more people. A lot more people who live close enough to drive. So the money being saved on airfare and hotels can and should go into the NFL’s coffers.

Why should that extra money go to the actual ticket buyer?

After all, the NFL is a poor old nonprofit.

Nonprofit, one might ask.

Nonprofit, indeed.

This is not, of course, to say that NFL teams are nonprofits. For the most part, they’re completely lucrative, veritable gold mines that are shrewd enough to sucker state and local governments into spending hard-earned, grudgingly paid taxes to build swank new stadiums for them to play in. And the teams themselves do pay taxes. Of course, they get to deduct the dues they pay to the NFL Which each year distributes all the money (from TV rights, jerseys, etc.) that’s left over after expenses back to the teams… So, around, and around, and around we go….

The NFL’s tax-exempt status is part of some lip kiss that Congress gave them when the AFL and NFL merged in the way-back.

At least one senator – Tom Coburn of Oklahoma – thinks that NFL as 501 (c) has got to go.

There may not be many things I agree with Tom Coburn on, but this would be one of them.

Just as a matter of principal, eliminating this farce seems like the right thing to do. Football commissioner Roger Goodell is paid $30 million a year. What kind of a nonprofit is that?

“Tax earmarks are essentially tax increases for everyone who doesn’t receive the benefit,” Coburn said in his press release proposing to tax America’s most popular sport. “In this case, working Americans are paying artificially high rates in order to subsidize special breaks for sports leagues. This is hardly fair.” The NFL did not respond to requests for comment. (Source: Business Week.)

Coburn’s not going out on a shaky limb in terms of his home state here. Oklahoma does not have an NFL team of its own.

Still, standing up to Big Sports is not without risk, and I’m sure he’s caught some flak.

Meanwhile, last year,

…Coburn estimated that the change could “generate at least $91 million of federal revenue every year” from the NHL and NFL alone

Accounting pencils being as sharp as they are, the net-net to the government would probably be zilch.

Still, I wish the best of luck to the esteemed junior senator from the great state of Oklahoma.

Boola, boola to him!

Come along and wear my party dress…

They’re called “ward-robers”, and what they do is stretch their clothing allowances by borrowing those items they’ll only need for an isolated occasion. Items that, even if the occasion weren’t so isolated, you wouldn’t want to show up wearing if you’d already worn the same item at some prior occasion. Items like party dresses.

But ward-robers don’t do what the rest of us have done for as long as there have been friends and sisters within one standard deviation of our own size. I.e.,  borrow those items.

These days, borrowing from friends and family is, apparently, passé. After all, what you get that a-way is apt to be the wrong color. Or last year’s model. Or a bit off in size. Or already been worn for a special occasion.

So ward-robers take themselves shopping.

And once they find an item they like, they actually buy it.

They then get to wear it.

Ah, the benefits of ownership!

And then, once Cinderella returns from the ball, the ball gown does a disappearing act. But the ward-rober isn’t stuck sitting around in rags.

No, the cagey ward-rober just returns the “gently worn” item and gets her money back.

This is a big problem: retailers estimate that about 3 percent of their returns involve some type of fraud. Like returning something that you’ve already warned.

As with so many other things these days, the problem of:

…wardrobing has been exacerbated by social media. Call it the Instagram effect. “We love our selfies,” [Susan Scafidi, a Fordham University law professor who specializes in fashion] says. “More items become single-wear, in effect, because everybody has seen you in it.” (Source: Business Week.)

It’s a bit difficult for someone who wore a green jumper and white blouse every day for twelve years to get too excited about everybody having seen her in something, but there you have it.

Bloomingdale’s, for one, is mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’re affixing big chunks of black plastic to items:

The tags, fixed to high-fashion garments in highly visible places, are the department store’s new strategy to keep crafty shoppers from buying clothes, wearing them, and then returning them. Once buyers remove the tags, Bloomingdale’s, a unit of Macy’s, won’t take back the garments.

I don’t know how this is going to work if an item turns out to be defective in some way, and someone has a legitimate reason to return it. But maybe that’s just a problem that occurs when the hem unravels on a twelve-dollar tee-shirt after a couple of washings, and not on a “$1,100 red leather dress.” (Not that wardrobe malfunctions never happen…)

Some industry watchers think that this is a bad idea:

“In an era when the shoppers have all the power, the last thing you do is anything that might alienate them,” [Mark] Ellwood says. “It’s the retail equivalent of not dating anyone until you’ve seen their STD tests.”

Well, if Mark Ellwood has a better idea for catching ward-robers…

As a matter of fact, he does. In the world of big data, stores can:

…flag shoppers who return items frequently.

And just how does this help them thwart ward-robers? Can they refuse to sell to, or take returns from, frequent returners?

If I were a store selling the sorts of upscale items that lend themselves to ward-robing, I think I’d hire someone to monitor social media for signs that frequent returners had gotten some wear out of something.  It might actually be kind of fun confronting a ward-rober with evidence of her malfeasance. (Sorry to keep referring to a ward-rober as “she.” Guess I’m profiling a bit here.)

Nordstrom’s, by the way, has no intention of tagging their items with big chunks of black plastic.

“Our experience is that if you treat the customer with respect, they respect you back,” [spokesman Colin Johnson] told Bloomberg.

I love Nordstrom’s, and wish one would open nearby. (There is a Nordstrom Rack, but it’s not the same.) But what about those 3 percent scofflaws who are shoplifting or ward-robing, which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much just risk-free shoplifting? Maybe the 3 percent violators don’t count as customers to begin with.

Many long years ago, I was actually the victim of ward-robing. And it had nothing to do with a red leather party dress worth $1,100.

I had purchased a madras shirtwaist dress at Filene’s Basement.

It was a good bargain. I loved the colors (purples and blues). And I figured that, coupled with a navy jacket, it would make a decent enough work outfit.

It was just the right size. I didn’t even bother to try it on.

Until I got home.

And realized that it had been previously worn by someone with incredibly powerful BO – far more potent than anything that could have been given off by merely trying an item on. Nope, this was the real BO deal: that sucker had been worn on a very sweaty day.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I really wanted that dress, so, rather than bring it back to The B, I tried to wash it out. A couple of times. But that was a pure Lady Macbeth effort. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I was never able to get that whiff of some complete stranger’s BO out of my nostrils.

The dress ended up in the charity donation bag. Unworn. At least unworn by me.

So to hell with ward-robers.

I hope Bloomingdale’s nabs them all.

Knickerbocker Holiday

I like New York in June, how about you?

I also like New York in September, and apparently everyone else and his brother does, too.

So when we made a quasi last-minute decision to spend a bit of time in our favorite city in the world (other than Boston, at least for me), it was a bit difficult digging up digs.

For the last few trips we’ve made to The City, we’ve gone the short term apartment rental route, and have found interesting places, East Side, West Side, all around the town. We thought that, once again, we’d have our pick of location, and were focusing on Gramercy Park and the West Village.

Alas, we had left things pretty late. And we hadn’t factored in the recent crackdown on short term rentals that has resulted in, among other things, Airbnb being declared illegal.

Not that we were looking at Airbnb. They’re a bit too Millenial hipster for our tastes, and we’re not all that interested in throwing our sleeping bags down in someone’s living room.

But, thanks to the hotel industry – and landlords who weren’t thrilled with their tenants subletting, and condo and co-op owners who didn’t like finding strangers roaming their halls – the mellow of foregoing a hotel room in favor of a real apartment in a real neighborhood has been somewhat harshed. Fines have been levied, and plenty of rentees are running scared.

While we were looking around, I called a number for a listing that had one property with a 30 day minimum, and an indication that they had other places, as well. The woman that I spoke with – who sounded like the actual owner, not an intermediary – was almost tearful when she told me that anything less than 30 days was illegal.

Personally, I can see why a landlord wouldn’t want his renters turning around and doing short term sub-rentals. And co-op ownership is sufficiently weird that you don’t actually own your own place, so I can see them being finicky. But if you own a condo, why is renting it out any different than a homeowner on The Cape renting their place out for a few weeks during July? Or a condo owner in Vail renting their unit out when they’re not going to be there during ski season? As long as the taxes get paid… And as long as renters (that would be us) understand that, in dealing with some of the outfits that take care of the short term rentals, it’s caveat emptor.

(We almost bit on one place which looked pretty nice, only to find a couple of reviews that talked about the agency as doing some fine-print bait and switch: suckering people into a 10% discount, then putting them in terrible, totally sub-par rentals, which the renter had agreed to by taking the 10% discount. Thank you, Internet!)

Hypocritically, I must say that I wouldn’t want to see an endless parade of short-term renters revolving dooring it in our condo building. But NIMBY aside, surely an occasional “paying guest” is okay – especially in NYC, especially if that paying guest is me.

Anyway, it was looking as if our search might fail, and we were thinking of throwing in the towel and checking into a hotel, when we decided to take a chance on someone we had rented from before.  In the interest of diversifying the neighborhoods we “lived” in, we weren’t all that interested in going back there. But we had enjoyed the area, so…

Fortunately, they had just had a cancellation, and we were able to grab a flat in this nice little half resi-half commercial building (medical doctors and shrinks, and the property management company that we’re renting from) in a charming little neighborhood not far from Central Park on the Upper East Side.

We had to sign one more agreement than we had before, but, what the hell. I’m pretty sure that the owner/manager, while a mover, is on the up and up, crosses her t’s and dots her I’s, and pays her taxes. I gave the new form a scan, and we’re only on the hook for our week. We’ve done business with the owner/manager.  There’s nothing negative about her that I could find by going to the google. And if anything gets f’d up, she is just a blog post away from being savaged.

So I think we’re legal, but, ssshhhh, don’t start spreading the news.

We are looking forward to a week away from it all, which these days pretty much means we won’t be logging any hours at Mass General Hospital.

No plans, other than a lot of nice walks, a lot of nice meals, and a lot of nice chillaxin’ in our home away from home.

When we were in NY in July, the weather was putrid: 90’s and humid. So our walks were pretty much limited to out to lunch, out to dinner. Fortunately, there were plenty of excellent restaurants that were short hops from our pad. (The highlight of that trip, by the way, was running into Gloria Steinem on the street. We chatted with her for a few minutes, and she was quite gracious and charming. And let me tell you, we should all look that good at 79 years of age…)

So here we are, New Yorkers for the week.

We’ll trip the lights fantastic, on the sidewalks of New York.

I call nitwit on this looming patent fight

A few years ago, it was those rubber band bracelets that came in different shapes: animals, dinosaurs, txt terms (OMG, BFF), alphabet…

I just checked to see if they were still around and found that they are indeed, and that there are a lot more “themes” out there. You can now get Barbie, Angry Birds,  Justin Bieber and Kardashian packs. (They don’t call ‘em Silly Bandz for nothing.)

Then there were the bracelets made with colored threads. (I may even have a couple of those around here somewhere.)

But the new kit on the kids’ fad bracelet block is a loom for weaving rubber bands together and “a plastic C-shaped fastener [that] enables kids around the U.S. to connect loops of colored rubber bands to form bracelets,” that look like this:

Cool enough. Looks kind of like a less bulky, more wrist-friendly version of the gimp lanyards we made back in the day. And we handcrafted them without a loom or C-shaped fastener.

Not that we didn’t use looms.

Obviously, it was a lot easier to make a lumpy little potholder if you had a loom. Theoretically, you could make a potholder without a loom. But it would sure be a lot cruder and lumpier than the versions we made with a loom.

I suppose that the Knit-Wit was a sort of a loom, as well. As I recall, there were a couple of different versions of a Knit-Wit – which was pretty much a shape with pegs on it that wound yarn around to make things. There was one where you made some type of floret that you could put together to make scarves or, I suppose, if you were ambitious enough, an afghan.

Then there was this type, which was used to make yarn tubes used for what purpose I can’t quite remember. If you coiled enough of them, you could turn it into a yarn trivet, a chair pad, or a rag rug. Not that I ever did.

But whatever I made with a Knit-Wit, I did on my own, home-brewed version of it.

Crafty child that I was, I made my own Knit-Wit of the tubular variety by hammering a bunch of brads into a hollow cylindrical block (bright red – and thanks to whichever brother sacrificed this block in the interest of letting me make yarn tubes that were turned into nothing other than yarn tubes).

There was also something called a Doodle Loom, but I’m not quite sure what that was used for.

Anyway, trouble has reared its ugly head in contemporary loomville:

In August, the founder of three-year-old Rainbow Loom—a rubber-band jewelry-making kit that is a blockbuster seller this fall—sued rival Zenacon LLC, claiming it copied the "distinctive trade dress" of Rainbow Loom's "unique" C-shaped clips with its competing FunLoom product. (Source: WSJ.)

Admittedly, I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’ no invention, but it seems to me that there’s not a lot that’s unique about a C-clip, or the type of loom that lets you thread a bunch of rubber bands together. Not all that different than potholder looms or Knit-Wits, in the eye of this beholder.

Nonetheless,

Rainbow Loom's creator, Cheong Choon Ng , says he was angry enough to sue because FunLoom "works exactly the same as Rainbow Loom," and because he's responsible for creating a market for rubber-band craft-making.

"I made this famous," says Mr. Ng, who says he's sold more than 1.2 million Rainbow Loom kits so far. "I worked on it for three years and now everyone wants to come in."

Rainbow is also suing Toys ‘R’ Us for selling other rival looms. (For the time being, Rainbow only sells through Michaels.)

The FunLoomers aren’t buying it:

Steven Verona, whose company Zenacon makes FunLoom, denies the allegations. "Is a loom something new and novel? It isn't. It has been around for hundreds of years. Same as rubber bands," he says.

Plus Verona claims that both his C-clips and looms are superior. So there.

I’m sure that Mr. Ng is frustrated with the time he put into coming up with a fad toy, but this isn’t exactly a world-changing breakthrough like the Salk vaccine or the windshield wiper. Do we really think that this will even have the longevity of, say, the wiffle ball?

According to the WSJ, this is part of a looming problem that will only get worse as 3-D printing technology is more broadly adopted, and manufacturers will quickly be able to hop on the fad bandwagon, leaving the originator little time to capitalize on his inventiveness.

It’s also no doubt an outcropping of IP-palooza, in which people try to trademark/patent anything and everything where there may be a buck to be made. (Come on, was Pat Riley really the first person to coin the term Three-peat?)

See you in court!

Montessori Management

To say that the Montessori was not the approach of Our Lady of the Angels grammar school is to understate the obvious.

Let’s see (thank you, Wikipedia):

• Emphasis on independence
• Freedom within limits
• Respect for a child’s natural psychological, physical and social development

Well, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck.

Much as I’m sure the nuns wanted to run things this way, with 50 kids in a classroom, it just wasn’t possible.

For a couple of months in 7th grade, we actually had 100 kids in our class. Our nun had a nervous breakdown. So while they tried to line up a sub – which wasn’t that easy, midway through the year, when all the nuns were assigned. It wasn’t like they were going to spring for a lay teacher or anything - they doubled us up: two kids to a desk while they conducted their “search.” They ended up plucking a very sweet young nun who had not yet completed teacher training/college. She probably wasn’t that much older than we were. By the by, there were fewer discipline problems with Sister Martinet, I mean Sister Paulina, than there were with the poor nun who we gave a nervous breakdown. (They did not, of course, tell us that Sister F had an NB. This came out the next year when a nun let it slip in a diatribe. As in, “And it’s no wonder Sister F had a nervous breakdown.”)

Anyway, we’re not here to debate the merits of born-free Montessori, unleash the genius within vs. the standard parochial school ‘who do you think you are?’ approach of my childhood.

We’re here to talk about Montessori Management, which is – at least according to The Economist – how some hip and happenin’ companies are run. After nipping at Google a bit for its “juvenile tastes,” they note that:

Box, a Silicon Valley company, has installed swings in its headquarters. Red Bull, an energy-drinks firm, has a reception desk in the shape of a giant skateboard in its London office. Businesses of all types have moved towards sitting workers in groups in open-plan rooms, just like at nursery school. Time was when firms modeled themselves on the armed forces, with officers (who thought about strategy) and chains of command. Now many model themselves on learning-through-play “Montessori” schools. (Source: The Economist.)

The closest I came to a Montessorian environment was a quirky little Cambridge company that had a couple of video games in the kitchen. Not that I would have played, but by the time I got there, the games were pretty much obsolete. Interestingly, this place also went the this-is-the-Army-Mr.Jones route, bringing in a retired U.S. Navy admiral as COO to get the place ship-shape.

I suspect that, before he was piped aboard, The Admiral had nary a clue just how resistant our culture would be to his military charms. I got to work pretty closely with him on a couple of things and, at one point I said to him, “You know, Jim, if you had 17 legs you couldn’t kick ass hard enough and fast enough to get anything done around here.” He ruefully agreed.

Mostly, I spent my career in traditionally managed – by tech standards, anyway – companies. There were hierarchies. Managers managed. Underlings underlinged (and bitched).  I worked in several places that had bona fide tech genius around, but none of these companies ever managed to break through the overall managerial incompetence ceiling and become a household word.

Perhaps this was because our folks in charge – while they may not have suffered abuse by Montessori standards at OLA – had not been to Montessori schools. I find it amazing that:

The bosses of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) were all educated in Montessori schools. So was Will Wright, a video-game )pioneer.

And, for the most part, they credit Montessori with their creativity.

But it would be wrong to conclude that the success of Google and Amazon vindicates Montessori management. Both companies have pragmatically mixed progressive ideas with more traditional ones such as encouraging internal competition and measuring performance. Mr Bezos is also an enthusiastic employer of ex-military personnel.

Wonder if The Admiral is still working?

Nah…

Anyway, there’s been a bit of backlash forming against placing too much faith in Montessori’s “free-flowing creativity, endless collaboration and all things open-plan.”

Some are finding that all that emphasis on teamwork and collaboration actually stifles creativity, and results in “groupthink, conformity and mediocrity.” Not that those things don’t happen in non-Montessori environments…

There’s also some pushback on those open-plan office set ups that everyone’s gone so gaga over. In one study, researchers:

…found an astonishing amount of antipathy. Workers say that open-plan offices make it more difficult to concentrate, because the hubbub of human and electronic noise is so distracting. What they really value is the ability to focus on their jobs with as few distractions as possible. Ironically, going open-plan defeats another of Montessori management’s main objectives: workers say it prevents them from collaborating, because they cannot talk without disturbing others or inviting an audience. Other studies show that people who work in open-plan offices are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress and airborne infections such as flu.

Give me an office with a door that closes, any old day.

Having spent those months in the 100 kid classroom, I could live without an open plan…

Revel-ation. (Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.)

Aside from the occasion – okay, regular – lottery ticket, and the purchase of any raffle ticket that’s put before me, I’m never had the gambling bug.

I’ve been to the track a few times, and enjoyed it, but I’m strictly a $2 window – if that even exists any more – kind of gal, betting only on ponies with names that I like, or basing my wagers on the colors of the jockey’s silks.

In a casino, I’m good for as long as a $10 roll of quarters will last in the slots.

I guess you could say that every company I worked for back in the day was something of a gamble, and, sadly, none of them paid off big. I made a few bucks when one company I worked for was sold, but mostly, well, let’s just say that if I had a dollar for every underwater option I was ever granted, I might not be lighting cigars with five-dollar bills, but I’d be sitting prettier.

No, gambling is a vice that has never held much appeal. It’s just at such damnable odds with my closely held beliefs that, other than the occasional quarter found on the sidewalk, you generally don’t get something for nothing, and that, at the end of a long, clockless, windowless day, the house always win.

I have to believe that, deep down, gamblers know this as well.

How can they not?

It’s just for gamblers, the lure of something for nothing and/or beating the house must be just too powerful.

I’m not talking about professional gamblers here – pro poker players with excellent memories and the ability to interpret the other guy’s “tell”; Wall Street types who either truly understand or are good guessers about market direction – but the little guy schnooks who think that there’s easy money to be made if you just perfect-a the trifecta, who keep buying those PowerBall tickets (which, as someone with the benefit of an advanced degree from MIT well knows, is a complete chump’s game), and who have no problem pulling the arm of the one-armed bandit in hopes that a fortune in quarters will come spewing out.

At any rate, I was interested to read that a couple of Jersey boys (okay, one was a woman; I just anted to say Jersey Boys) are suing the Revel Casino in Atlantic City:

…for more than $35 million, claiming it “lured” patrons to its Atlantic City slot machines in July with a bogus promise to refund all losses…The suit, on behalf of “tens of thousands” of slot players in five states and Washington DC, accuses Revel Entertainment Group of breach of contract, unjust enrichment and violating state consumer-protection laws.  (Source, I’m a tad embarrassed to admit: NY Post. At least it’s not the Daily Mail….)

Revel had apparently been running a come-on ad campaign, promising:

“All July long, we’re going to refund all slot losses” and “You really can’t lose . . . If you win, you win. If you lose, we’ll give it all back!”

Which suckered those “tens of thousands” of slots players in without their reading the fine print, which the suit claims was “virtually illegible.”

If they read the fine print, they’d have seen that their losses would be covered by free slot play, done at 5% a week over 20 consecutive weeks.

So, if you lost, say $1K, in July, you could come back 20 times through the rest of the year an get comped for $50 worth of quarters a shot. Which, of course, if you’re a big enough gambler to be suing Revel, would just be pogey bait to get you to keep throwing good money after free money.

And while I’ve never been to Atlantic City, I suspect that even the most ardent of Jersey-ites aren’t willing to spend twenty consecutive weeks traipsing down there to hit the slots. (Does Atlantic City on a gray and drear November day sound like anything other than drop-dead depressing?)

Maybe I could make my way down there once or twice, if Bruce Springsteen were going to be there and personally sing, just for me, Thunder Road, Promised Land, and:

Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Part of the suit whines claims that Revel used their terrible come-on-a-my-house campaign to turn around their business:

“This deceptive business scheme . . . result[ed] in the first-ever profitable period since [Revel’s] opening 18 months ago,” according to the the court papers. It emerged from bankruptcy in May with a new marketing strategy aimed at a more traditional Atlantic City crowd.

(I.e., a crowd that smoked, didn’t like expensive food and booze, and was turned off by Revel’s initial “high-brow” la-di-da attitude.)

Well, duh-a-duh.

Revel’s is a business, and if its enticing ad filled the casino and the house won, well, that, like the Hokey Pokey, is what it’s all about.

How could anyone think that any casino was going to be playing “head’s you win, tails I lose”?

Come on!

This is the daffiest thing I’ve heard since Newt Gingrich set out his Social Security privatization scheme that would make anyone who gambled and lost back into the program and made whole. (So much for the notion that Republican’s are more sensible fiscal actors.)

How can you be grown up enough to go out gambling and not understand that if something sounds too good to be true, it is?

Isn’t this one of the few things you can pretty much always bet on and win.

Sadly, there are some folks out there for whom this is a revelation.

Sure, it was a bit snake-y (snake-eyes-y) of Revel to run that kind of a campaign. But, come on.

Maybe they’ll win there suit, but I, for one, wouldn’t bet on it.

If baby needs a new pair of shoes, they might be better off scanning the boardwalk for dropped quarters.

Anti-ballistic whiteboards for the classroom? Will Safeboards really make us safer?

Remember when the only projectile you had to worry about in the classroom was a nun hurling an eraser on someone’s head? Or some slimy boy hitting you in the back of the neck with a spit ball? (Ewwwww.)

Well, Columbine, Newtown, and the myriad school gun incidents in between, have certainly put those sorts of worries to a rest.

And now a company with a long history in the armored vehicle biz is bringing out bullet-proof bullet-resistant white boards for teachers and kids to get behind to protect themselves. (While reminiscing a bit here, remember a kinder, gentler time when sticking your head under a desk – good old ‘duck and cover’ – was going to protect you from a nuclear attack?)

Two school districts—one in Arizona and one in Utah, where IAC [International Armoring Corp.] is based—approached [chief executive Mark] Burton more than a year ago concerned about armed intruders. This, alas, was before the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The districts asked IAC to provide them with some kind of armored protection that would be discreet, functional, and affordable for use in elementary schools. “They didn’t want the classroom to look like a fortress,” says Burton.

IAC designed special walls it calls Safeboards that can be used as whiteboards—and can also withstand the firepower of handguns, automatic weapons, and nearly every shoulder-mounted weapon. When teachers hear an alarm or suspect trouble, they can slide the whiteboards over the doors to their classrooms. IAC can install corner partitions made up of sliding walls for more protection, a feature Burton calls safe havens. Each one can hold 37 kindergarteners. “We’re buying time until the authorities get there,” says Burton. (Source: Business Week.)

“Each on e can hold 37 kindergarteners.” This has to be among the sadness things I’ve read in a good long time.

Personally, I’d rather see more money go into mental health (including early detection of sociopathic youth) and trying to keep guns out of the hands of the sort of psychos who would shoot 37 kindergarteners as soon as look at them.

But you can’t blame schools and parents for being worried.

So now, no doubt, having pumped-up school security will become a budget line item, knocking out old-school things like books and student enrichment.

And we’ll get even more inured to the notion that guards carrying submachine guns, commando-suited SWAT teams (snarling German Shepherds optional) and – now! at last! - safe cloakrooms in classrooms = SECURITY.

The sliding whiteboard starts at $1,850, and each corner partition costs about $5,800. Elementary schools have an average of 25 classrooms, and Burton knows not all school districts can afford his products. For administrators, he says, deciding which schools, or even which classrooms, get the security systems can be a touchy subject.

As in “is a kindergartener’s life worth more than a third-grader’s life” kind of touchy subject. Not to mention as in “is the life of a kindergartener in a leafy suburb right out of a John Hughes movie more valuable than a kindergartener in a run down blue collar exurb” kind of touchy subject.

Because let’s face it, although “Safeboard™ is designed with functionality and cost in mind,” IAC will be catering to well-to-do, albeit paranoid, school districts.

The well-to-do and governments are natural constituencies for IAC.Their core business is armoring expensive vehicles – Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover, Lexus, Cayenne  - so selling into posh local governments should be relatively straightforward.

They’re already polishing up their messaging:

Safeboard is a cost effective solution to protecting those in the classroom.

Giving peace of mind to parents.

No need to worry about losing classroom space. Safeboard is right up against the wall and blends in with the rest of the classroom.

Blending an anti-ballistic wall in with the rest of the classroom is exactly what I do feel the need to worry about.

How can any of us enjoy peace of mind while living in a world where armor-all-ing kindergarten classrooms seems like a reasonable and prudent idea?

On my last day of kindergarten, we all wore party clothes to school, and had some ginchy little ceremony where we all wore mortarboards we’d made out of construction paper. It was a big day: next stop, first grade!

It was a warm late spring afternoon, and we were sitting around in our final semi-circle, basking in the affection of Mrs. Julia B. Hackett, perhaps the finest and kindest kindergarten teacher in the history of mankind. (If our other kindergarten teacher, the crabby Miss Bowen, was there that day, I’m blocking her out.) While we were sitting there in our finest, listening to Mrs. Hackett for the final time, some loud-mouthed young men were walking by Gates Lane School, heading over to Bennett Field to do their loud-mouthed hanging out, and one of them tossed a lit cigar into our classroom. They weren’t the usual suspects – grammar or even high school boys who might think it was a fun idea to harass a bunch of five-year-olds. They were, as we saw when we ran over to the windows to see for ourselves just who would do such a despicable thing, college boys.

Since we were on the second floor, whoever tossed the cigar in must have had a pretty good arm.

But what were they thinking?

Obviously not that the cigar could have hit – and burned (however minimally) – a kid.

Fortunately for all of us, the cigar landed safely in the middle of our story circle,where it sat stinking and smoldering for a few seconds until Mrs. Julia B. Hackett disposed of it

And that, my friends, is how kindergarten should be: the worst that can happen is some lout tossing a smelly cigar your way.

Anti-ballistic whiteboards.

God help us.

“Computer leave”? It’s Greek to me…

I’ll admit it. It’s exceedingly easy to kick a country when it’s down. But in this case, Greece is more of less wearing a “Kick Me” sign.

Not that they’re not trying to do something positive here – they’re planning to eliminate one of the many truly ridiculous bonuses that Greek – in this case government -  employees have long enjoyed.

Yet the admission that they even gave out such a bonus to begin with is yet another reminder of how profoundly wacky the Greek workers’ paradise was.

Here’s the story:

Last week, the Greek government eliminated a bonus that has been in place since the late 1980’s, when computers were first introduced into the workplace in great numbers:

The bonus, known as "computer leave," applied to workers whose job involved sitting in front of a computer for more than five hours a day—basically most of the staff working in ministries and public services.

"It belongs to another era," Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, said. "Today, in the era of crisis, we cannot maintain anachronistic privileges." (Source: WSJ Online.)

The reasoning behind this bonus – six extra days off (with pay) – for using a computer. was that those who work on computers are entitled to a 15 minute break every couple of hours. Since it’s not generally possible to take those breaks – even in Greece, I guess – those quarter-hour missed breaks were aggregated into an extra six paid holidays for civil servants who used screens and keyboards while on the job.

If we had this in the private sector, looks like I’d be lining up to collect 180+ vakay days. Sweet!

Yet while working on a computer all day can be a drag -  tired eyes, carpal tunnel – it seems that there are other things that are more hazardous to your mental and physical health.

How about accruing bonus pay for time served sitting through incessant and boring meetings where nothing is accomplished? Even if you subtracted the hours spent in interesting and productive meetings, most everyone I know would end up with plenty of meeting-wasted hours to spare.

Special time off could also have been given based on the number of times someone else took credit for your work. Again, for the sake of fairness, this one should net out those occasions when you may have done a bit of credit-grabbing of your own. (Lesser points taken off when it was a sin of omission – letting someone think you were responsible for something good – vs. a sin of commission, where you explicitly hogged the kudos.)

I think it would have been nice if women got at least one day off a year for having to put up with the “voice as dog whistle” syndrome, in which a suggestion made by a woman is ignored, until it is taken up a couple of minutes later by a man, at which point it is wholeheartedly embraced.

And speaking of women, in Greece, they had previously done away a perk that surely must come under the heading “anachronistic privilege":

It has already limited the pensions that unmarried daughters are allowed to collect when their father dies.

My father died when I was 21. I didn’t get married until I was fifty.

You do the math.

Even a paltry stipend of $100 a month would have added up for may over the years.

And they also:

… scrapped a bonus for showing up to work on time.

Huh?

I’ve heard of getting your pay docked for clocking in one minute after the whistle blew, but getting paid more to get to work on time?

It must be hell to be there now, but, boy, it must have been a blast being a Greek while the good times were rolling.

I read somewhere else that there was also a bonus given to some workers if they washed their hands regularly.

Perhaps this would be a good one to institute, given how germy the workplace can be, and how careless some folks are when it comes to hand hygiene. (Grossness alert: I was once in a bathroom where, from the sounds of things, a woman took out a used tampon and put in a fresh one, and then walked out without washing her hands.) But can you imagine keeping tabs on it?

I guess you could do it now by having “smart soap dispensers” and “smart faucets” that read your “smart employee badge” and recorded whether you used soap, how long you let the tap run, and how energetically you scrubbed.

The Greeks are surely being punished now by the spectacularly egregious, economically idiotic, sins of their past.

But when you read about bonuses like “computer leave” and the one for showing up on time, it’s no wonder that Germany and the EU sometimes wish they could wash their hands of the entire situation.